Asus brings 4K to your desktop with massive 31.5” 3840×2160 monitor

You'll want to check that your graphics hardware is up to driving it, though.

Asus has just announced the cure for the common 20-something-inch 1080p display: a small TV-sized 31.5-inch monitor with a massive resolution of 3840×2160. Engadget reports that the Asus PQ321 display, which uses IGZO technology to reduce energy usage and thickness, includes DisplayPort and dual-HDMI input, integrated speakers, and an adjustable stand.

Not just any graphics hardware will be able to drive such a high-resolution display, however, and we'd like to clear up some of the misinformation out there that Asus' announcement has prompted. Most midrange and high-end cards from Nvidia's GeForce 600 family and AMD Radeon HD 6000 and 7000 series should support 4K resolutions over HDMI and DisplayPort, at least, owing to their support of HDMI 1.4 and DisplayPort 1.2. Both of these interfaces should provide sufficient bandwidth to drive a 4K display, though in some cases at a refresh rate of only 30Hz rather than the more common 60Hz.

Integrated graphics are a bit more complicated. Intel's current HD 4000 graphics can support 4K output with the most recent graphics drivers, but only on laptops and motherboards with a pair of DisplayPort outputs (a relative rarity in systems that rely on integrated graphics). AMD's Trinity APUs should theoretically be able to push these high-res displays, but AnandTech reports that they support neither 4K video decoding nor 4K video output. As such, you'll likely have to wait for the next generation of integrated GPUs to get good 4K support—the GPUs paired with Intel's Haswell CPUs will offer DisplayPort 1.2 support, and Intel is pushing its 4K prowess hard in its marketing materials.

This time next year, we ought to see 4K monitors (and the hardware and software needed to support them) become more mainstream, but as of right now Asus' TV-turned-monitor is out there on the bleeding edge. This monitor, along with a 39-inch model, will be shown off at Computex next month and is expected to be available in North America toward the end of June. Pricing information is not yet available.

The resolution sound beautiful, but isn't software support a bigger deal? I have no direct experience, but I've heard that Windows doesn't handle the scaling needed very well/globally. And I really doubt you're going to find many games that take full advantage of this resolution.

In short, what's the use case? I guess it might be a chicken/egg problem - without the screens being common there's no incentive for the software to handle it gracefully.

On desktops, couldn't I just use two hdmi, or dvi display ports? Or is it not supported as well at the time?What about crossfire then?Personally, I think this is great for early tech acquisitors, though still considering on a 2560 monitor.

Oh man, I have been waiting for one of these for ages. As soon as one hits the $999 price point, I will buy it straight away.. I might need to get another 670 though. At least I could kiss Anti-Aliasing good bye (well, most of it)

My first thought was "aaaargh" - since I just sprang for a 2560x1440. Then I read the rest of the article (30Hz refresh, graphics power necessary, etc) and I dont' feel so bad. Maybe in a few years it will be more feasible.

A single display of this resolution would practically eliminate the need for a multi-monitor setup for many, that resolution is (naturally) the same width as two typical monitors, but double the height so you'd get the space of four monitors.

30" displays are just too large for me. You have to start seriously moving your eyes or even your head to see. I enjoy the seperation you get from two monitors, and a single 30" leaves no room on most desks.

Still, that monitor looks freaking awesome. The resolution is very cool.

To be truly useful in Windows, AeroSnap will have to have more than just side-side-top to make use of such a massive resolution. I have a 2560x1440 and I would really appreciate the ability to snap to a quadrant. Or some sort of an all-inclusive window tiling shortcut.

The resolution sound beautiful, but isn't software support a bigger deal? I have no direct experience, but I've heard that Windows doesn't handle the scaling needed very well/globally. And I really doubt you're going to find many games that take full advantage of this resolution.

In short, what's the use case? I guess it might be a chicken/egg problem - without the screens being common there's no incentive for the software to handle it gracefully.

The resolution sound beautiful, but isn't software support a bigger deal? I have no direct experience, but I've heard that Windows doesn't handle the scaling needed very well/globally. And I really doubt you're going to find many games that take full advantage of this resolution.

In short, what's the use case? I guess it might be a chicken/egg problem - without the screens being common there's no incentive for the software to handle it gracefully.

I wouldn't be too concerned. The article says 140 pixels per inch. Your basic 21 inch 16:9 1920x1080 is just over 100PPI, and a (mostly hypothetical, outside of a few laptops, alas) 16 inch 16:9 1920x1080 would be almost exactly the same pixel density. Probably not something that you would read 10pt text on all day without a little zoom; but likely survivable for the icons, dialog boxes, and other things that tend to scale really badly and/or break when you adjust system zoom, and not an issue for things like word processing, PDFs, and web pages, where in-application zoom actually works reasonably well.

As for games, I suspect that games don't necessarily ship with this resolution on the drop-down menu(or even with texture assets large enough to do it justice under all circumstances); but most modern game engines are reasonably resolution agnostic(this isn't the old days of sumptuously detailed, hand-drawn, sprites that only work at one, maybe two, resolutions), though it may require a command line invocation or some .ini file poking to make them run in a resolution that wasn't anticipated at release.

On the other hand for doing static projects and graphic work. 30 hz isn't an issue. (in fact, Amigas operated at 15/30khz as I recall) Rendering quarkxpress pages at Print resolution, retouching in photoshop, it's good to go.

The resolution sound beautiful, but isn't software support a bigger deal? I have no direct experience, but I've heard that Windows doesn't handle the scaling needed very well/globally. And I really doubt you're going to find many games that take full advantage of this resolution.

In short, what's the use case? I guess it might be a chicken/egg problem - without the screens being common there's no incentive for the software to handle it gracefully.

Medical imaging and photo/video editing?

10-bit RGB is a good sign; but those two markets will probably be looking very hard at color accuracy, non-marketing-lies contrast ratios, and the like, before they bite.

(Also, you don't even want to know how much it costs; but Team Medicine may be spoiled by hardware like this little puppy, with its modest 4096 x 2560 resolution and 10-bit greyscale reproduction.)

It's better than the venerable IBM T220(3840×2400 on a 22.2 inch panel, in 2001) which had the minor downside(aside from the list price) that it could end up as low as 13Hz unless you had 4 DVI links to work with, and a setup that could handle the downright weird arrangements for driving the panel

PC Perspective got a Seiki 50" display for $1300 (now $1500) tested it. Due to the usage of HDMI 1.4, it only supported 30 hz at 3840 x 2160 resolutions. The impressions weren't as dire for gaming as one would believe, mainly because the GPU hardware had troubles getting above 30 fps with high image quality. They did note that working at the desktop didn't feel quite as smooth for things like moving windows due to the refresh rate.

This Asus monitor sounds awesome though. 60 Hz via DisplayPort 1.2 is great and allows for a bit of future proofing when faster GPU's can run games at a good 60 fps at 4k resolutions. Now I just need to the price.

I suspect that games don't necessarily ship with this resolution on the drop-down menu

If the game is doing it right, it gets a list of supported resolutions from the OS. Of course, not all games have particularly good PC versions; these ones tend to hard-code a list of resolutions.

I run a 3x1 Eyefinity setup at home for 3240 x 1920 virtual resolution via three 1920 x 1080 displays in portrait mode. It has been quite rare for me to find a game that doesn't work at that resolution, though most do not default to it when launching.

On desktops, couldn't I just use two hdmi, or dvi display ports? Or is it not supported as well at the time?What about crossfire then?

No, a single port is all that's going to work (if you're thinking back to dual-link DVI, that's also just a single physical DVI port, merely with all the pins/links enabled instead of only half of them). For gaming, yes, you would probably need a pair of high-end video cards in Crossfire/SLI to drive a 4K display at acceptable frame rates, and you might need more than 3GB of memory per card depending on the title.

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. Intel's current HD 4000 graphics can support 4K output with the most recent graphics drivers, but only on laptops and motherboards with a pair of DisplayPort outputs

Wait what? Is this just badly worded or did I miss something here? I'm not aware of a single consumer motherboard or laptop with dual DP outputs on it...

Is DPI an issue? Sure there are more lines, but there is also more real estate. Does the DPI get better with it? Or does it not matter?

DPI (dots per inch) is a function of both resolution and screen size. So increasing one much more than the other (much more resolution with not much increase in size) is going to raise the DPI.

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Edit: THanks Thjaeger. How does that stack up to other mid to high end 22inch monitors (+/-)?

It's much higher. Most displays hang around the 90-110 DPI range. Going much higher than that means you need scaling in the OS to keep things readable for a significant portion of the population, and we all know how well current OSes handle arbitrary scaling (i.e. much better than just 5 years ago, but still badly).

My first thought was "aaaargh" - since I just sprang for a 2560x1440. Then I read the rest of the article (30Hz refresh, graphics power necessary, etc) and I dont' feel so bad. Maybe in a few years it will be more feasible.

The monitor DOESN'T have a 30Hz refresh. It runs at a full 60Hz. The 30Hz is just the limit for HDMI. If you use DP 1.2, the monitor will run at a native 60Hz.

Bout damned time. I have a friend who hauls his godaweful CRT monitor around to LAN parties because it has a much higher resolution than current gen LCD/LED monitors. Really has pissed me off that we went to better technology and lost tons of resolution in the process. Now we'll just have to wait for a fix for the price.

On desktops, couldn't I just use two hdmi, or dvi display ports? Or is it not supported as well at the time?What about crossfire then?Personally, I think this is great for early tech acquisitors, though still considering on a 2560 monitor.

We use them in a project I work on for displaying data. I also have one on my desktop The 2560x1600 blows 2 x 24" 1920x1200 display out of the water any day. The only catch is you need a decent graphics card that can handle dual-link DVI output or have a display port.

Avoid the current HP ones as the DVI-D board is flaky as all hell but the display port works on them. The Dells are much better where both the DVI-D and display port work.

Roughly twice the pixels but more than twice the (guessed) price. I'm truly salivating at the thought of having 8 million pixels in one screen, hopefully two of them side by side. I'd rather have the two screens than a nice car. But from the comments above it seems that it may be a year or two before there's enough graphics support for a dual configuration.

Andrew Cunningham / Andrew has a B.A. in Classics from Kenyon College and has over five years of experience in IT. His work has appeared on Charge Shot!!! and AnandTech, and he records a weekly book podcast called Overdue.